“Vehicle-to-X communication systems”, which are designed to transmit both traffic-related data and a range of service data such as entertainment applications, for instance, are known in the prior art. Vehicle-to-X communication in such systems is based both on data transfer amongst vehicles (vehicle-to-vehicle communication) and on data transfer between vehicles and infrastructure equipment (vehicle-to-infrastructure communication).
The high level of reliability and data integrity required of information transmitted by vehicle-to-X communication means that such information must additionally be provided with a complex security signature and/or data encryption.
Analyzing such a security signature or decoding such data encryption, however, is associated with a relatively high level of computing effort. Moreover, particular situations arise, for instance passing a heavily used town-center junction at rush hour, in which such a large number of vehicle-to-X messages are received that processing all the received vehicle-to-X messages likewise is only possible by providing a relatively large amount of computing power.
With traditional surround sensors, the amount of data to be processed is set by the design of the transducer, and the hardware and software for the processing steps can be adjusted accordingly to this largely constant amount of incoming data, whereas in contrast, in a vehicle-to-X communication system, the amount of data depends on a multiplicity of factors such as the proportion of other vehicles and infrastructure equipped with the technology, the vehicle density etc., and ranges from zero messages per second (travelling along a lonely country road) to the theoretical physical maximum of potentially several thousand messages per second (approx. 1000 with regard to a currently envisaged channel, ITS-G5 CCH at 6 Mbit/s gross).
Therefore hardware and software of a vehicle-to-X communication system must be designed for a reasonable amount of data. Currently such figures are calculated from supposedly realistic scenarios, e.g. 400 messages per second. The behavior of the system for greater amounts of data is undefined, however.